


sleek and gleaming pelt

by bellafarallones



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Light Angst, M/M, implied/referenced suicidal ideation, talking about fudge, werewolf stern
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27498784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellafarallones/pseuds/bellafarallones
Summary: It had been the night of the full moon, and they had it handled, really, what with the fire and firearms and Beacon.But there’d been a howl through the trees, a howl that was like nothing on Earth or Silvain, and then a beast like a wolf had leapt into view, a beast with thick black fur and a pale purple shirt, tattered over its broad shoulders, that read BIGFOOT IS MY BOYFRIEND.
Relationships: Barclay/Agent Stern (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 42





	sleek and gleaming pelt

**Author's Note:**

> the suicide reference is brief and vague and about stern hating that he's a werewolf

It was the night of the full moon, and Barclay was sitting in the dark lobby of Amnesty Lodge, listening to the wind through the trees. The abomination would arrive soon. 

The stairs creaked above him, and he looked up. It wasn’t Dani or Jake, down for a midnight snack. He almost didn’t recognize Agent Stern creeping down the stairs, dressed for once not in a suit and tie but in sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt that read BIGFOOT IS MY BOYFRIEND. Barclay froze. Stern did not look around, and slipped out the front door of the lodge without seeing him.

Last month they’d fought the abomination in the woods, Barclay and Mama and Ned and Dani and Duck. It had been the night of the full moon, and they had it handled, really, what with the fire and firearms and Beacon. 

But there’d been a howl through the trees, a howl that was like nothing on Earth or Silvain, and then a beast like a wolf had leapt into view, a beast with thick black fur and a pale purple shirt, tattered over its broad shoulders, that read BIGFOOT IS MY BOYFRIEND. The mystery-beast had held the abomination down until Duck could slice its head off and then bounded off into the woods again. 

Barclay got up and followed Stern outside. Tracking him through the woods away from the lodge was a simple task: Stern picked his way through the underbrush like a man unused to wilderness.

It was almost midnight when Stern stopped, leaned against a tree to catch his breath. Barclay, thirty feet behind him, shifted nervously. He really didn’t want the abomination to find Stern out here, and he was starting to regret not bringing Mama with him for backup.

A stick snapped underneath his feet, and Stern whipped his head around. “Barclay!” His eyes were wide with terror. “What are you doing here?”

Barclay took a few steps forward, but stopped when he saw Stern backing away from him. “What are _you_ doing here? It’s not safe to be alone in the woods in the middle of the night.”

“You gotta get out of here - fuck - look, I know this is unbelievable but you’ve gotta believe me and you _need to leave right now._ ”

“Why?”

Stern gestured wildly up at the sky, where a full moon glowed behind shifting gray clouds. “I’m a werewolf and I’m about to transform!”

“Are you going to try to hurt me?”

“I don’t know! I always black out I don’t know what I-” Stern’s voice was frantic, panicking, and he tried to run, stumbled, and hit the ground on all fours. Then he was screaming and shuddering and Barclay stood frozen as Stern’s face elongated into a snout and his shoulders broadened and the hair thickened on his arms into fur. 

Stern stood up. He was lanky like a greyhound, just a bit larger than a human, but held himself on two legs as easily as a bear. This was the creature that had fought the abomination.

“Well, that explains that,” said Barclay aloud. The part of his mind that had been Mama’s right-hand man for two decades now thought immediately of how this could be useful against the abominations, how wolfed-out Stern could fight without the man himself ever knowing about it. But the part of his mind that had been having coffee every morning for the past two months with a handsome, well-dressed lodge guest felt guilty for it. “Agent Stern?”

The werewolf turned around. Its eyes were yellow, and it growled low, hackles raised. 

Barclay felt fear for the first time that night and pulled his bracelet off. Now he was taller than Stern was, bulkier too, though his teeth were not quite so large. The werewolf dropped back to all fours and whimpered, tail between its legs. 

“Yeah,” Barclay said. “Not so tough anymore, are you?” He stretched out a hand, like he would to a strange dog. “Do you… know me?”

Stern edged forward, sniffed at Barclay’s hand, and licked it with a warm pink dog-tongue.

“That doesn’t really answer my question. I guess you know you don’t hate me, at least?” He scratched behind Stern’s ears, eliciting a whimper and a wagging tail. 

Barclay sat down on the leaf litter and patted the ground between his legs. Stern leaped, bowling him over, paws on his chest, and Barclay panicked for a moment before he realized Stern was licking his face. “Not how I’d imagined being kissed by you,” Barclay admitted, petting Stern’s neck and shoulders.

After a while Stern calmed down, laid his head in Barclay’s lap and stretched his lanky body out across the forest floor. 

“Is it too much to ask that you’ll be this chill with me being bigfoot when you’re human?” Barclay didn’t dare to find out. By the time the horizon turned pink with the beginnings of dawn, Barclay was back in human form, almost nodding off against a tree when he heard Stern groan.

“What the-” said Stern. “Barclay! What happened?” And then Stern was on top of him, just like he’d been before, but now his hands were on Barclay’s arms and chest and shoulders and cupping his cheeks, checking Barclay’s person for injuries. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Did I hurt you? Why are you still here?”

Barclay shrugged. “You were fine.”

“Oh, thank Jesus,” said Stern, moving back as though he’d just realized how much he’d been inside Barclay’s personal space. 

“We should probably get back to the lodge.” Barclay stood up and offered Stern his hand. 

“What did I… do?” said Stern after a few minutes of walking through the trees.

“You acted like a dog. We played fetch.”

Stern blushed deep pink. “Oh, Christ, that’s embarrassing. And speaking of embarrassing, this shirt was a gift, by the way, from my mother when I told her what I was going to Kepler to do. I promise I have better taste.”

Barclay looked over at Stern’s bigfoot shirt. “I wasn’t going to comment on it.”

Stern took a deep breath and continued. “Normally the morning after I feel like _shit._ Everything’s sore and I’m vomiting up pieces of small mammal for the rest of the day. But today my muscles are fine and I don’t even feel sick.”

“You didn’t eat any squirrels that I saw, so you should be fine on that front. I’m glad it was better.” Barclay had no idea what kind of reaction a normal human would have. He suspected his own nonchalance was colored by his own experience with shapeshifting and monstrousness, but of course he couldn’t tell Stern that. “Do you just go out into the woods every month?”

“Pretty much. I was… attacked when I was in college, so I haven’t been doing this all that long.” He gave Barclay a sharp look. “You don’t know any other werewolves, do you?”

“What? No.” Barclay was a far more adept liar than Duck, but this wasn’t a lie.

Stern’s shoulders slumped. “You just… seem so calm about all of this. I’ve never met another one. Well, except the once, but it wasn’t what I’d call an illuminating conversation.”

\--

It was early afternoon. Barclay was sitting in the lobby of the Amnesty Lodge, significantly groggier than he’d been the previous night when he was worried about an abomination showing up at any moment. The phone rang, and he jolted for it.

“Hello?”

_“You will want to tell your friend about your true nature.”_

“Indrid?”

_“Indeed. Unfortunately we do not have time for small talk. If you do not speak to Agent Stern in the next… four minutes… the effect on your emotional state will be, shall we say, deleterious?”_

Barclay said nothing.

_“Three minutes and fifty seconds, now.”_

Barclay slammed down the phone and went up the stairs to Stern’s room and knocked on the door, a little heavier than he should have.

Stern opened the door. His shirt was untucked, but otherwise he looked normal. There was a black handgun on the desk. 

Barclay had been shot at too many times to be fond of guns, and wanted very badly to back out of the room, but Indrid was rarely wrong. “What’s wrong?” said Stern.

“I… just wanted to say hi?”

“Oh.” Stern looked surprised, and for a moment Barclay thought he’d misstepped, but then he stepped aside. “Come in, then.”

Stern leaned back against the bed, long legs braced on the floor, and Barclay took the chair. “Does the FBI know?” said Barclay.

“No. Do you really think they’d let me go free, uncontrolled?”

Something dark rose in Barclay’s throat. “But you’re hunting bigfoot for them, knowing that he’ll get the same treatment.”

Stern laughed a little, ran a hand through his dark hair, tousling it. Fuck, he was attractive. “No. My superiors do not believe in bigfoot, and I wouldn’t myself if not for…” He gestured noncommittally. “Thus they will not be surprised if I tell them I’ve given up. No, when I find bigfoot, I intend to ask how he does it. How he stays hidden. How he survives.”

“Ah.”

“How’s the pumpkin fudge going?” said Stern lightly.

“What?” Then Barclay remembered that he’d been trying to develop a recipe for it, that he’d complained to Stern about the difficulty he was having with it. “Oh, yeah. I’m still having a little trouble with the texture.”

“My grandpa used to take his fudge out in the snow as soon as he’d poured it to make it harden faster.”

“Was this before freezers were invented?”

“This was in Iowa, so outside would have been significantly colder than the freezer. I don’t know what he did if he wanted fudge in the summer.”

Barclay nodded. Maybe he could get Aubrey to cast some kind of ice spell. 

“You’re sure I didn’t do anything bad… last night?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a relief. Normally I have to read the papers to see if I killed anyone.”

“Have you?”

Stern shook his head. “I usually make it pretty far into the wilderness, and wake up near where I went out.”

“Do you want me to stay with you again next month?”

Stern lifted his head to meet Barclay’s gaze. “You’d do that?”

“Of course. You seemed really upset, beforehand, and once you were wolfed-out I think you appreciated having someone there.”

“I don’t want to drag you into this. I really don’t.” Stern fidgeted with the cuff of his shirt. “I’ll give you my gun. And you have to promise that if I try to hurt you, in any way, you’ll put a bullet in my head.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t. Even like that, you won’t.”

“I could! Barclay, I remember what it was like to be attacked!”

“No, you couldn’t.” The genuine fear in Stern’s voice resigned him. Barclay pushed himself off from the desk, checked that the door was locked, and lowered the blinds on the window. Then he pulled his bracelet off. “Because I’m bigger than you.”

“Ohhh holy shit,” said Stern, clambering backwards onto the bed. “You’re bigfoot.”

“Yep.” 

“It’s actually you! Oh god do I have so many questions for you. Are you - are you the only one? How does the disguise work? Hold on.” Stern half threw himself off the bed to dig in his backpack until he found a notebook and pen. “Okay. Now I’m ready.”

“I’m the only bigfoot. Not the only cryptid. Some of the others are also real. The disguise is enchanted into this bracelet, I don’t know whether the spell works on humans.”

Stern held out his wrist. “You could find out.”

Barclay hesitated. He’d never trusted a human anywhere _near_ as much as it would take to do this, or even traded disguises with another Sylph. It felt too intimate, somehow, like letting someone else inside your skin. 

He closed the bracelet around Stern’s wrist, and found his own eyes looking back at him. 

“Did it work?” said Stern. 

Barclay only nodded. He supposed the transformation wouldn’t feel as dramatic going from one human look to another, only the melting and reforming of cheekbones and eyes shimmering from blue to brown. Stern moved from the bed to stand in front of the mirror. 

“Oh,” he said. His hands hovered over his face, Barclay’s face, as though he wanted to touch it, but pulled away. Then he took the bracelet off and handed it back. “Well, that answers that question.”

Barclay slipped the bracelet on again and returned to himself. He didn’t want to freak Stern out too much. His gaze caught on the gun still lying on the desk. “Can you… put your gun away?”

“Oh! Of course,” said Stern. He went to the desk and worked mechanically, his hands knowing what to do as he unloaded the gun and put it and its bullets back in a locked case, and then back into his suitcase.

Unloaded it. The gun had been loaded. Barclay felt sick. 

Deleterious to your emotional well-being, Indrid had said. 

“Were you -” Barclay met Stern’s gaze, and his question died in his throat. “Never mind.”

\--

Passing Mama’s office, Stern caught raised voices. Being a secret agent, he put his ear to the door. 

“Can’t you convince him there’s something happening in town?” Mama was saying.

“Like what? What do you want me to say?” Barclay, sounding almost frantic. 

“I don’t know, a sale on tacky cryptid merchandise?”

“No! If anything, maybe this is a sign that he deserves to know!”

Stern was pulled roughly away from the door, and looked up into the thundercloud-grim face of Ranger Duck Newton, who was for some reason holding a sword. “Real classy, Stern.” Duck yanked open the door. “It’s here! And Barclay, you’ve got an eavesdropper to deal with.”

Mama strode past Barclay and out the door without looking at Stern, cocking her rifle as she went. 

“Hello, Joseph,” said Barclay. “How much of that did you hear?” He gently tugged Stern into Mama’s office and shut the door behind them.

“Were you talking about me?”

“Yes,” said Barclay. He sat down in Mama’s well-loved desk chair. 

“There’s something you don’t want me to see.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen my darkest secret - and apparently told your boss about it? - and you’re still hiding stuff from me.”

“Turning into a wolfman once a month does not give you license to know about every supernatural thing happening in the world!” 

Something heavy slammed against the office door. 

“Shit,” said Barclay, and ripped his bracelet off. Then he tackled Stern to the floor, covering him with his body as the door gave way.

Hitting the ground knocked the breath out of Stern, but he recovered fast. Barclay held him to the ground easily, larger even in human form and insurmountable as bigfoot. This close Stern could smell Barclay’s woodsy scent, hear Barclay’s stuttering breath as _something_ ripped into his back. Barclay was protecting him with his body. 

Stern’s mind roared: he was angry, of course he was, and embarrassed that Duck had caught him eavesdropping and Mama apparently knew he was a werewolf, but beneath that he felt powerless and he hated it. And he was itchy, too, his hands and arms and _what_ was happening to his fingernails -

Barclay met his gaze. “Stern. You’re -”

Stern threw Barclay off of him. “Holy shit.” His voice came out alarmingly deep. “Shit! Fuck!” His claws sank into black ooze. “I’m still myself! What the fuck!”

A blade swung down half a foot in front of Stern’s nose. He looked up and saw Duck Newton.

“What the fuck?” said Stern. The monster melted into nothing, leaving not even a stain on the carpet. 

The fur on Barclay’s back was streaked with blood, and when he put his bracelet back on, the back of his shirt was shredded. “You’ve done that before,” he said. “Two months ago. We were fighting an abomination, and you showed up. We didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know until I saw you last month.”

“I didn’t know I could do it outside the full moon.” Somebody’s dog, as always, wanting to protect Barclay so bad he activated his supernatural powers.

Duck shrugged. “Shit happens.”

“I wanted to protect you.” Stern’s head was spinning. He was as exhausted as he ever was after transforming. “I’m going to bed. Still mad, by the way.”

“Of course.” Barclay still looked relieved. 

“And one more thing.” Stern walked up to Barclay and took his face in his hands, felt the light scratchiness of his beard, the insufferable sincerity in his eyes. 

“Yeah?” said Barclay, softly.

Stern leaned forward and kissed him. Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the room, ready to collapse into bed and sleep ‘til morning.

**Author's Note:**

> thought about a part 2 to this where they recruit indrid to track down the werewolf that infected stern, but it turned into my werewolf oc seducing the mothman


End file.
